KOCHI, November 11: There is more to the `Nehru Jayanti Suvarna Jubilee rally' being organised by the Karunakaran group in the Congress Party here on November 14 than mere commemoration of the birth anniversary of the first Prime Minister of Independent India.

The rally is being designed to provide a springboard for leaders like K Karunakaran, his son K Muraleedharan and former KPCC treasurer and Ernakulam District Congress Committee president K V Thomas -- all waiting to bounce back into active politics after remaining on the sidelines for some time.

Karunakaran has been talking of concentrating more on Kerala politics after he fell foul with party president Sitaram Kesri and found himself out of the latter's kitchen cabinet.

But the two rival groups -- the Antony group and the `third group' -- were in no mood to accept him once again as the leader after his fiasco in Delhi.

Karunakaran has been lying in wait for a chance to stage a comeback and the November 14 rally is being planned to provide him with just that.

Muraleedharan was pushed to the sidelines in the party after his electoral debacle in the last Lok Sabha election in Kozhikode. K V Thomas too faces a similar predicament; he lost the Lok Sabha election in Ernakulam following the marine survey scandal.

Muraleedharan confined himself to only group activities after the last Lok Sabha election and Thomas went back to Sacred Heart College, Thevara, to teach chemistry.

However, both were looking for earliest opportunity to resurrect themselves politically.

Muraleedharan and Thomas are in fact the chief organisers of the November 14 rally besides, of course, Karunakaran. Significantly, the publicity thrust has been given to Karunakaran by the rally organisers with the obvious intention of projecting him as the only ``saviour'' of the Congress Party in Kerala and as the only potential challenger to the Marxist Party.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.